ABSTRACT
When the Spanish Crown established its state apparatus on the colonized subjects of the Americas, indigenous people were considered legal minors and they needed legal advocates called ‘protectors of the Indians’ (legal supervisors) to access the Spanish colonial justice system. This de jure status, however, did not translate into social or legal reality for all Amerindians at the same time. In the Andes, Inca women continued to present themselves before the Spanish courts to claim individual and kinship rights to titles and resources throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. Still, it took the notary’s mediation to turn their requests and actions into legally valid records.1 The documents from which these women’s voices emerge are heavily mediated indeed, but they exist because they register specific intentions. As Vicente and Corteguera have argued, the analysis of women’s representa-
tions in textual sources, including legal documents, should be threefold: to examine the language used by women according to their own identities, intentions and purposes; to find the subtle ways in which these women let their voices be heard using all sorts of rhetorical skills; and to understand that some of these women needed to use common sense with their words (11). Following these analytical tools, this chapter examines the probanzas de méritos y servicios (certified proofs of merits and services) and informaciones (judicial inquiries) of three women of the Inca nobility as sources of their textual self-representations. However, as the production of legal documents implied more than a two-way
contact process, we must reconfigure the concept of the ‘contact zone’2 by exploring the intercultural, social and gender differences that affected their content. Probanzas and informaciones are heavily mediated documents. They do not present a transparent rendition of the Andean past. Yet, they constitute a means of memory transmission through the written word. Besides functioning as juridical tools for these Inca women and their descendants, the probanzas and informaciones I examine in this essay constructed highly politicized narratives of family genealogies and intrigues that came to dominate the legal discourse over gender and status.
